NASA’s next planetary venture? Drilling into Mars

NASA has made its final selection for the next Discovery-class exploration mission, and the space agency wants to drill into Mars.

NASA has chosen Mars over a Titan splashdown and a comet hopper.

“The exploration of Mars is a top priority for NASA, and the selection of InSight ensures we will continue to unlock the mysteries of the Red Planet and lay the groundwork for a future human mission there,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a news release. “The recent successful landing of the Curiosity rover has galvanized public interest in space exploration and today’s announcement makes clear there are more exciting Mars missions to come.”

The InSight mission will place a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior. With the goal of understanding how Mars formed, the probe will drill 30 feet into the Martian crust to take the temperature of the planet, and include a seismograph to detect Marsquakes.

(NASA)

As a Discovery class mission — the cheapest of NASA’s three kinds of planetary exploration missions — it’s designed to perform quality science on a budget. The cost of this mission, excluding the launch vehicle and related services, is capped at $425 million in 2010 dollars.

20 Responses

Because that is the year it was first proposed. One of the good things about the Discovery-class missions is that they put fairly strict (for NASA) budgetary limits in place. If this starts to go over budget, then it will be axed.

For those following Curiosity, you might be interested to know that Pathfinder was a Discovery-class mission to demonstrate that rovers could work on the surface of Mars. Without Pathfinder, there would be no Curiosity.

For those following DAWN, you might be interested to know that NEAR-Shoemaker was a Discovery-class mission to demonstrate autonomous navigation near an asteroid. Without NEAR-Shoemaker, there would be no DAWN.

The original plan was to drop a whole set of them across the planet as impactors and send the recordings up to an orbiter. That would have given a fairly good view of the planet’s interior. Unfortunately, it was far too expensive to fly.

I was lucky enough to work with the seismometer that JPL developed for the mission, monitoring earthquakes in Monterrey Bay. It is about the size of a pencil case and can be dropped into the ground from more than a half-kilometer up. Way cool tech!

I hope before I die of old age, I’ll be able to see us set foot on Mars. This will bring us one step closer but it is a shame that it may not even happen and if it does, it will be in 2016. This is going to be hard to pull off, drilling 30 feet and all. If it does get pulled off we will not only learn more about Mars, but also about Earth and our planets future as well.

Maddie, NASA is spending very little money to get very valuable results, knowledge that will help us on this planet too. For reference to how little money this is, people spent about 50% more money on Apple products like Macs and iPhones last year than all of NASA’s budget. If you’re not excited about the pure scientific research being done, just look at the historical record of products that we use daily that were originally NASA spin offs, and you’ll see we’re getting a lot of value from NASA that helps us right here on Earth.

Somewhere out in space, there may be a 1000-foot space rock destined by the laws of physics to strike Earth someday. When that day approaches, if we haven’t funded NASA (or successor agencies) to develop spaceflight capability to deflect the rock, then how much we “straighten our planet” between now and then will come mostly to naught anyway.

Lack of magnetic field and any evidence of recent volcanic activity would seems to make that quite a stretch I would think. As far as subsurface geologic activity I would think Mars was the least interesting. Would rather see a probe of this sort sent to one of the many interesting moons. Or used to advance (yes the funds are not near enough) manned exploration as much as possible. Just my laymans opinion.

I’ll grant you that putting this sort of lander on Io (the most volcanically active body in the solar system) or on Europa or Titan (two excellent candidates for “inner oceans”) would yield a lot of science. But I expect that the lander on Mars will both provide some interesting insights and demonstrate the capability – which will make it easier to justify those more challenging missions.

I am telling you guys, they could care less about Mars Quakes, they are searching for oil. This thing sounds exactly like a west Texas drilling rig being operated by remote control. I am willing to bet that Exxon and the other large oil companies are hand in hand with NASA. Nation security initiative , provide energy for your population,keep the GNP up, and onto be concerned with the poor. It all fits .